10 of the best: birthday pieces

The Queen is celebrating her 90th with music from Andrea Bocelli, Alfie Boe and Katherine Jenkins. With what music have kings, queens and commoners past celebrated their birthdays?

Handel: Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne

Handel composed this cantata for the 48th birthday of Queen Anne in February 1713. With words by Ambrose Philips, it celebrates not only the monarch’s big day but also the treaty of Utrecht that ended the war of the Spanish succession. According to the Duke of Manchester, Anne was “too careless or too busy to listen to her own band, and had no thought of hearing and paying new players however great their genius or vast their skill”. She may not have listened to the piece, but it swelled Handel’s coffers to the tune of £200 a year – for life.

Bach: Sinfonia to Cantata No 42

For the opening Sinfonia of his Cantata No 42, Bach recycled part of a celebratory serenade he had written for the 24th birthday of Prince Leopold, his employer during his time in the city of Cöthen.

Brahms: Serenade No 2

Brahms’s Serenade No 2 expressed his budding love for Clara Schumann, widow of composer Robert, who had died three years earlier. Brahms presented the score to Clara as a birthday present on 13 September 1859. She particularly loved its slow movement.

Wagner: Siegfried Idyll

Wagner wrote his Siegfried Idyll shortly after the birth of his only son Siegfried – named after the hero of the opera on which he was working at the time. The piece was a surprise birthday-cum-Christmas present for his wife Cosima. She woke up on Christmas morning 1870 (the day after her 33rd birthday) to hear its opening strains performed by a small ensemble on the staircase of their villa in Tribschen, Switzerland, overlooking Lake Lucerne: “As I awoke … no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming … such music! When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but so were all the rest.”

Richard Strauss: Horn Concerto No 1

Strauss originally conceived his First Horn Concerto as a 60th birthday gift for his father, Franz Joseph Strauss, the cantankerous, sometimes boorish but highly accomplished principal horn of the Munich Court orchestra. Unfortunately, it wasn’t finished on time and when Franz saw how high some of the writing was, he refused to play it. You just can’t please some people.

Fauré: Dolly Suite

Fauré’s charming Dolly Suite is a series of pieces written to celebrate birthdays and other events in the life of the young daughter of the composer’s mistress. Its delightful Berceuse was later used as the signature tune to the long-running BBC radio programme Listen With Mother.

Tippett: Suite for the Birthday of Prince Charles

The title of this lyrical, allusive and sometimes humorous piece is self-explanatory. It was written in 1948, in November of which the Queen gave birth to her first child, the future Prince of Wales, and aired on national radio later that year.

Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No 2

This cheerful neoclassical work was a birthday present for Shostakovich’s son Maxim, whose first performance of the piece, on 10 May 1957 (his 19th birthday), qualified him for entry to the Moscow Conservatory. The concerto simply brims with boyish cheek and musical mischief, though its slow movement is Shostakovich at his most unashamedly romantic.

Britten: A Birthday Hansel

Britten composed his A Birthday Hansel for the 75th birthday of the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, at the request of her daughter Elizabeth II. The piece was first performed in January 1976 by Britten’s partner Peter Pears and harpist Osian Ellis. Britten celebrated the Queen Mother’s Scottish ancestry by choosing to set poetry by the Ayrshire bard Robert Burns (Hansel being a Scots word for gift or present).

Peter Heidrich: Happy Birthday Variations

In this light-hearted novelty piece, Heidrich subjects Mildred J Hill’s universally famous tune to a series of 11 imaginative variations, each in a different style. They are: Bach; Mozart; Beethoven; Schumann; Brahms; Dvořák; film music; ragtime; tango; polka and waltz; and finally a Gypsy tzigane. Here’s a version for string quartet.

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